Your viral election: Honest to vlog

So, it turns out that sometimes when you take a swipe at someone’s YouTube video, they notice. Apparently. So apparently, in fact, that I got an email from Giovanna Mingarelli of M&C Crowdsourcing Communications this morning asking if we could chat about the idea of crowdsourcing an election.

For those of you who might not have read yesterday’s viral update, I took issue with a video that was apparently about crowdsourcing, but failed to explain to me how exactly it pertained to the current election.

I can’t say I was surprised that Mingarelli wanted to have a word. After all, when your burgeoning project for democratic involvement is referred to as a video about “how I spent my summer dictatorship,” you’d probably want to set the record straight. So fair enough.

Here’s the video I didn’t like yesterday, for the record:

Anyway, the site that the video is promoting is ifwerantheworld.com. Here’s Mingarelli on how it works:

It’s “a radically simple web-based platform designed to turn good intentions into action… The whole point is to make it ridiculously simple for anyone to act on an intention,” she said.

The site, she says, takes the intentions expressed on things like Facebook and Twitter and “actually translates them into a tangible activity that anyone anywhere can do. That’s called a micro-action. Such as vote on May 2nd.”

It kind of works like a search engine, apparently.

“If I have an intention – say I want to solve world hunger – something that’s absolutely impossible to do on your own… you go to IWRTW, the first thing you see on the screen is ‘If I ran the world I would’ and then a blank box.”

(Note: Actually, on Thursday, this is what you saw when you visited the link in the video.)

(Awkward. To explain: it was apparently due to a larger issue to do with Amazon Web Service. I’m told it will be back.)

In any case, where were we?

“What you then do is type in exactly what you would do… what happens next is that a crowdsource algorithm will drop all of the different bite-sized actions that anyone anywhere in the world – because it’s a global platform – is doing to help solve world hunger,” Mingarelli told me.

Got it?

OK, fine. It’s the Internet. I get it: Pic or it didn’t happen. Here’s a video, you lazy bums.

So there you have it. Not only do you get to refer to yourself as a superhero (!), but you apparently also get to justify talking like Juno. Honest to vlog.

Anyway, how does it relate to politics? Basically, you can type in what you would do if you were to rule the world, and then find out whether – theoretically – a politician is doing anything similar, or that might have a platform that could match up with your desired plans for world domination. Basically.

It’s already been used by one high-profile Canadian MP.

“Justin Trudeau used IWRTW as an action platform to promote his MOvember campaign last year,” Mingarelli wrote later in an email.

There you have it. Thoughts on this idea, and how it might change things (or not)? Let me know: email [email protected]; twitter @cfhorgan

2. Infallible laws

Well, that was heavier than usual. Civic engagement? Blech, yuck. That was like, an actual something in what is usually a sea of snarky nothingness (which, come to think of it, is a fairly decent description of the Internet as a whole. Write that down, everyone.)

Know what there hasn’t been enough of this election? Fake videos. Better yet, fake captions for videos a lot of people can’t understand.

It’s a joke, right? Tell that to YouTube commenters, who never miss a beat.

Obviously, there’s the obligatory blind hatred:

Good grief.

Then there was this:

HAHAHA.

Actually, wait a second – that sounds pretty serious?

And what would any video on YouTube be without someone referencing World War Two and/or Hitler? Impossible to say, given how rare they are. They are basically the Dodo of the YouTube world. That is rare. Are you getting how rare they are? Dodos, people. That is an extinct animal.

You read that right. That was an anonymous YouTube user reprimanding another anonymous YouTube user about the true meaning of identity. It’s like nobody’s even trying anymore. If the internet were to die tomorrow, I’d like to volunteer that last sentence as its epitaph.